05/10/2026
Happy Mother’s Day!
Today, as I reflect on this day, I find myself sitting with two very different, yet deeply connected thoughts. The first is the quote often attributed to Sigmund Freud: “If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.” The second is a daughter’s prayer to heal her mother in all of her wounded places.
As an adult woman, I have come to recognize how often I measured my mother against impossible expectations simply because she was a woman and because the archetype of “Mother” is burned so deeply within us as the one who nurtures, protects, and teaches us how to exist in the world. The Mother represents the force that gives life, nourishes life, and shapes our earliest understanding of love, safety, and belonging.
What we often do not know, nor are we meant to fully know as children, are the circumstances, wounds, losses, and inheritances that arrived before us through her. With time and wisdom, I have come to understand that people are doing the best they can with the resources they have available to them at that moment.
Adulthood eventually asks us to come to terms with a complicated truth: our mothers were also daughters of wounded mothers. No matter how subtle or profound those wounds may have been, they shaped her life while simultaneously shaping yours.
Today, I’d like to offer this prayer for all of us, not only for those who identify as mothers, because inevitably this becomes a prayer each of us needs in some way: for the parts of us that nurtured, the parts that were neglected, the parts still longing to be held gently, and the parts still learning how to soften.